On 12 June, the governments of
Macedonia and Greece announced that they reached an agreement to change
the former’s name. This decision comes months after King Mswati III of
Swaziland changed his African nation’s name to eSwatini.
A nation’s name, like a flag or a national anthem, is part of a
country’s identity; thus, changes to any of them are momentous
occasions.

Recent Changes to Country Names
Due to space issues, we will briefly, and solely, list changes to
nations’ names that have taken place during the past few decades. (In
other words we will not discuss changes to flags, as New Zealand almost did in 2016, or the Czech Republic’s adoption of “Czechia” as a moniker, also in 2016).

For example, the late President Laurent-Desire Kabila changed Zaire’s
name to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) after coming to power in
1997. Two years later, in 1999, the late President Hugo Chavez renamed
the Republic of Venezuela to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. A
decade later, in 2009, President Evo Morales changed his landlocked
nation’s name, from the Republic of Bolivia to the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

More recently, in 2012, the Republic of Hungary became simply Hungary. A year later, in 2013, Cape Verde
became the Republic of Cabo Verde. Finally, as previously noted,
Swaziland is now the Kingdom of eSwatini, while the Former Yugoslav
Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) will now be known as the Republic of North
Macedonia, assuming that the June 2018 agreement with Athens is
approved by both parliaments.

Why Change?
There are several reasons why a government may decide to change the
country’s name. For example, Macedonia is changing its name in order to
put to rest a decades-old dispute with Greece, which will hopefully mean
that Athens will stop blocking Skopje’s attempts to join blocs like
NATO and the European Union.

Other reasons may have to do with a leader’s political ideology, for
example, the late President Chavez added the word “Bolivarian” to
Venezuela’s name in honor of his hero, the 19th century South
American liberator Simon Bolivar. Similarly, President Morales of
Bolivia added the term “Plurinational” to celebrate the nation’s linguistic and cultural diversity—he is Bolivia’s first indigenous head of state, which likely influenced his decision.

In Kazakhstan’s case, the Kazakh government aims to distance itself
from the other “stans,” through its potential name change. A 2014 article in The Economist explains that the Kazakh leadership “puts itself in a different league from its neighbours. ”

A Name, An Identity
As previously mentioned, a country’s name is part of its national
identity, and it is important for any government to keep in mind how its
population will react to such changes; there have been mixed reactions
to these initiatives. For example, there have already been protests in Macedonia due to the government’s decision, and there was also popular unrest in Hungary when its name change occurred.
Conversely, the international media has not reported major unrest in eSwatini surrounding its new name, perhaps because, as a BBC report argued, the population has other, bigger concerns, like poverty and high HIV levels.

Similarly, the Venezuelan government’s addition of an adjective to the
country’s name, rather than fully changing it, explains the little
opposition regarding this decision—in any case, Venezuela’s political
and economic meltdown are the population’s main concerns nowadays, and
outweigh the praising (or not) of a 19th century liberator.

As the aforementioned examples have demonstrated, the very name of a
country, the building block of a person’s national identity and sense of
patriotism, continues to evolve in the 21st century. Such a
change not only has bureaucratic implications—updating passports,
driving licenses, maps, anthems, state-owned companies and a plethora of
official documents—but also affects a person’s national identity, which
can result in negative reactions, as is currently happening in
Macedonia.

A country’s name tells the history of its people, and in the age of
the “global everything,” it is important to understand how these new
names came to be and what do they mean, as this will influence how the
rest of the world will interact with these newly named nations.

About the author: Wilder Alejandro
Sanchez is a researcher who focuses on geopolitical, military, and cyber
security issues in the Western Hemisphere. Follow him on Twitter: @W_Alex_Sanchez. The
views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do
not necessarily reflect those of any institutions with which the author
is associated.